I was walking near the boulevard Saint-Michel the other day with an American friend when he pointed something out to me. We were passing an ordinary-looking café, and he told me that this was a very special place. It had featured in a book about Paris, apparently, in which the author (an American) had rather excitedly caught sight of a famous author and declared the spot a literary monument. Among some Americans, my friend told me, it had become a place of pilgrimage, as well as being hailed as the archetypal French brasserie.

I looked inside, I perused the menu. It was lunchtime, but everything looked pretty banal. It didn’t have that lively warmth that a bustling Parisian lunch place can exude. Even the off-chance of spotting a famous author didn’t drag me in.

It reminded me of the day last week when I was in the neighbourhood… Read more

Paris is a very dense city, which may explain why, as well as going for walks, jogging and picnicking in parks, Parisians also enjoy climbing down into the catacombs and up on to the rooftops.

There is a whole sub-culture (literally) of wellington-wearing party-goers who regularly disappear into drains for a night of damp claustrophobia in the old chalk quarries that criss-cross Paris’s hills.

Their counterparts are the so-called “toiturophiles” (roof-lovers) who climb out on to Paris’s famous zinc to enjoy the views across other areas of zinc. This is a dangerous sport, and not just because the roofs are so perilously sloping. At the moment, with machine guns guarding every media building, synagogue, Jewish school and sensitive embassy, the sight of a few shadowy figures on a rooftop is likely to be met with a hail of bullets. There are probably a few shadowy figures up there… Read more

The good news is that Parisians are out and about, despite the bitterly cold weather, attending a large public gathering that could be a target for anyone wishing to terrorize the population. It felt re-assuring to see so many people simply carrying on with everyday life.

The bad news, for me at any rate, was that so many of my co-residents were out and about that I couldn’t get in to visit the new Philharmonie building on its open day. This is the gigantic new concert hall on the northern edge of the city, at the Parc de la Villette. Well, I could have waited, but the two queues of prospective visitors were three or four deep and 50 and 100 metres long (those are estimates, by the way, I didn’t actually measure them). It was also freezing cold, and as an über-Parisian, queuing up is not my speciality, so I wandered around the outside of the building then went for a coffee.

One thing that almost everyone comments on when they arrive in Paris is the smoke. Not the stuff coming out of chimneys, which rarely puff anything other than steam and gas fumes, because coal is forbidden and wood stoves are rare. No, visitors are usually commenting on the clouds emitting from mouths, especially young mouths.

It is a very common thing to see groups of schoolkids in front of a lycée (mainly for 15-19-year-olds) lighting up before they go in for lessons, during lunch break, or after they’ve finished for the day. It’s almost as common to see teachers slaloming through the crowds on their way into the building, apparently oblivious to the under-age tobacco consumption going on mere inches from the educational establishment. And at a school near where I live, pupils… Read more

For once, the victims of a Parisian train strike probably had a smile on their face, albeit a wry one. This week, half the trains on two suburban lines took the day off in support of workers’ rights. Often this kind of thing happens when a driver or conductor is attacked by hooligans, but in this case, it was slightly different.

On Wednesday, eight signalmen came up before a disciplinary committee after holding a drinks party in the signal box, during which one of them almost directed an incoming train on to an occupied platform. Fortunately there were no accidents – except the one that led to a video of the soirée leaking out and getting the signalmen into trouble. Their punishment – two of the men were suspended for two days.

The unions announced that the sanctions were too harsh, and called a strike in their support,… Read more

I spent last week on the island of Oléron, off the west coast of France. For those that don’t know it, it is a large, ancient sand dune, now populated by pine trees, grape vines, salt marshes, small towns and excellent fish restaurants. It has a more famous neighbour, the île de Ré, where posh people go to be with other posh people, but I think it’s only out of laziness. If you drive an hour further south, you get this bigger island with fewer people, lots more trees, and much better beaches.

Sitting in the garden of my rented house, I heard more jays than cars (a deep squawk, like a shy magpie, as opposed to a loud brrrmmm – easy to distinguish). At the beach I saw no jet skis, which is always a good ecological sign – the opposite of seeing lichen on trees. And in the restaurants, the waiters and… Read more

France is a wonderful place for the mildly depressed. As well as a generous health service that reportedly dishes out more anti-depressants than anywhere else in the world, it is overflowing with alcohol. You can get a drink, legally and cheaply, any time of the day.

On Sunday night, there was probably quite a lot of quaffing going on. France had spent the day voting in local elections in 36,000 separate communes. The name makes it sound as though they’re all hippies living on goat farms imbibing home-made plonk, but the commune is the basic unit of French local politics, a community governed by a mayor and a local council, varying from tiny hamlets in Provence consisting of five retired English bankers and a token farmer to the large arrondissements of cities like Marseille and Paris.

On Saturday evening, all the talk on the television debates was about just one of these constituencies. The extreme right-wing Front National had won council seats in 315 communes, and had got a mayor in a town called Hénin-Beaumont in the north ofFrance, where 6006 people voted FN and elected their candidate by a majority of 32 votes (a result that is being challenged).

One mayor and 315 communes out of 36,000 may not sound a lot, but every politician coming on to the main talk shows was immediately asked the question: what about the Front National? Voting in an extreme right-wing mayor in the north of Franceon Sunday was, for the mainstream Paris-based journalists, a bit like having an uncle tell racist jokes at their wedding reception. There’s something amiss in the family: what does it mean? Did Aunt Brigitte sleep with an SS officer during the war? Does papa secretly think that President Obama is an inferior human being? Is it going to spread to other relatives, including moi?

The success of the FN causes a right-thinking angst, so that everyone (on TV at least) feels the need to disapprove and express deep concern about hidden reserves of national prejudice. Sometimes it’s genuine, but more often it feels as though they’re making a fuss to show that they’re politically correct. It seems more likely to that the vote was about something different. The French aren’t really that right-wing – lots of them are just fed up with mainstream politicians of both sides doing absolutely nothing about the economy, both local and national, except bicker between right and left and make empty promises. It was a protest vote – a sort of “FN you”.

Of course there are people who blame all their ills on immigrants, but surely a fair proportion of those would be less intolerant if they were being given decent job prospects and didn’t have to blame anything on anyone. I read that in Hénin-Beaumont, only five per cent of the population has had a tertiary education, which usually equates with fairly bad job prospects. It sounds very much like a place that has been let down by a whole succession of Ministers of Education and Employment. So their vote was really a form of protest against the status quo.

In any case, there definitely is malaise inFrance, and watching all the politicians rowing on TV about whose fault it was didn’t especially help raise the national mood. Looking at the politicians’ faces, it really felt like a “glass half-empty” place, with the implication that it just got a little bit emptier.

Yesterday I was in a café having my morning caffeine shot. No one was talking about the elections, but one man at the end of the bar was grumbling generally about politicians, public transport and the weather to his neighbour, who was trying to read the horse-racing pages. The grumbler was one of the few men you see these days drinking booze at breakfast time. He was on beer, and appropriately his demi glass was nearly empty. No one took any notice of him except the waitress, who came over and asked him if he wanted a refill. She, at least, was obviously a “glass full” type of French person. Right now, they need a few more of them.

Stephen Clarke’s latest book about France is The Merde Factor, in which the hero tries to become a French civil servant and get a boring but stable job for life.

A decent suitcase is guaranteed for life these days. My own little four-wheel-drive weekend bag has been repaired at least three times for free after I thoughtlessly lifted it by its long retractable handle while it was half-full of books. No problem, I take it back to the shop, they send it off, and a week later it comes back, as good as new, its handle just a little shorter (I reckon I’ve got about five more repairs before it shrinks out of range.) Even so, this bag that has taken me on countless short business trips and weekend breaks, always avoiding check-in thanks to its squat size and my resolution to buy toothpaste in tubes of 100ml or less, just became obsolete.

I was on my way to Germany with a low-cost airline, and my trusty bag didn’t fit in their little suitcase-torture frame, that evil machine by… Read more

Two people have shown me the same photo of a historical Parisian building this week. Or three if you count the barmaid at my local café who always assumes I want to read the newspaper with my coffee, and who kindly shoves it across the bar at me, even if I’m barely awake and trying to remember how to open the little paper tube of sugar on my saucer.

It was a photo of a railway station. Usually you only see those when there’s a strike on, but this time it was something completely different, even if the crowds in the photo were very similar to those of the poor commuters struggling to board the only train leaving that day. The people in the photos were queuing up, in quite an orderly fashion, to get a closer look at the renovation work that’s been done on the Gare Saint… Read more

It was 11am this morning, in a crowded street of shops and cafés. He was a 30-something man, not rich by the looks of him, dressed in jeans and an old leather jacket, an off-duty car mechanic maybe. She was older, maybe 40 or more, long black hair, sober clothes, black knee-length skirt, short bulky coat. They were walking in opposite directions, like a dozen other people, heading either towards the Métro station or the corner café. As they came within a couple of yards of each other, they must have exchanged glances, because he suddenly said, in mid-stride “Combien?” (How much?). She replied with a number I didn’t hear. He shook his head, shrugged and kept walking to the café. She carried on in the other direction. It all lasted about three seconds.

I was surprised. I’ve never seen anything like it happen there before. It’s not a… Read more